


Not Tonight

by Waldo



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-11-22
Updated: 2000-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:43:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waldo/pseuds/Waldo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel's had a lousy day which is turning into a lousy night.  It's a crapshoot as to whether Jack's well-intentioned questions are making things better or worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Tonight

  
  
Jack hit the illumination button on his watch before rolling over to check on Daniel. Sixteen hundred. At home. Which didn’t help on P3X-989 much at all. It was still pitch black outside the little window in the tent. It had been dark for about three hours before they’d turned in , and Sam said it was summer here, which meant... well, that it was o-dark-thirty and that Daniel should be asleep. Not reading that damn letter. Again.

He shifted onto his back and sat up. “Daniel?”

Daniel flinched and flicked off the flashlight. “Sorry.”

“Want to talk about it yet?”

“Not especially.”

“Okay.” Jack rolled over and made himself comfortable against the small camp pillow. Daniel had been sorting his mail from home when Jack had come in to pick him up for the briefing. He'd stuffed a few personal correspondences in a book and shoved the bills in a drawer as they’d left and then proceeded to pack the book for their survey of the planet they were now on. They were there for a mineral survey. Two and a half days of sampling and testing various grades of Naquadah, Trinium and what Sam suspected was platinum. Didn’t leave a whole lot for Daniel to do, so he and Jack had volunteered to set up camp while Teal’c and Sam started their collections. Tents set, fire wood gathered and a firepit set, Daniel had sat down to read and respond to his letters while he still had a little daylight.

He’d been depressed and testy ever since.

“Okay?!” Daniel repeated incredulously.

“Yeah. You know where to find me when you want to talk. You don’t want to talk, I’m not going to force you.” Jack rolled back onto his back, eyes closed, feeling a another stupid spat coming on. The last one had been over the last clean towel in the linen closet. Jack had argued that Daniel should just use the one he’d used that morning, since, after all, you used it *after* you showered, so it was *clean* and Daniel had argued that it was wet and therefore useless and why couldn’t Jack remember to do the damn laundry when he knew Daniel was coming over. It’d been dumb then, he was convinced it was still dumb and now they were going to have another dumb argument. At o-dark-thirty.

“Fine.” Daniel snapped, pulling his sleeping bag around his shoulders and rolling onto his side, back to Jack.

“Daniel, for Christ’s sake, I *asked* if you wanted to talk. You said *no*. *Now* you’re pissed that I’m *not* getting pushy?”

“I said ‘fine’, Jack. Now let me go to sleep.”

“Fuck ‘fine’, Daniel. Let me see that letter.”

“No.”

Jack rolled his eyes. What the hell did Daniel want from him? “Okay, then tell me what’s in it that’s had you all pissy tonight.”

Daniel’s hand came up over his head and he hunched further into the sleeping bag. “I can tell how much you care,” he spat.

Jack was about to lose patience with the other man at decibel levels that would have woken Sam and whatever culture might have died on this planet any number of millennia ago. Then he saw the motion Daniel thought he was cleverly disguising. Squeezing the base of his skull.

Migraine. Shit.

Jack sat up, turned the lantern on low, grabbed Daniel’s backpack and rummaged through it for the the little blue box Daniel kept his allergy pills and migraine medicine in. His own canteen was easier to locate, so he grabbed it and unscrewed the top. “Come on, Danny, sit up and take these.”

“What?” Daniel demanded.

“Your pills, you have a headache.” Seeing the argument form, he added, “Ah! Don’t. I saw you rubbing your head and it would explain your mood. Now come on.”

Daniel grudgingly sat up and took the proffered tablets and downed them.

“Come on, turn your back to me.” Jack helped Daniel turn a little and started rubbing extremely tense shoulders.

Daniel pulled his knees up and dropped his aching head against them. They sat for a while, Jack silently working out the tension that could have been as equally a result of the migraine as the cause of it.

Jack tread carefully as he moved to Daniel’s neck and near those sensitive pressure points at the juncture of his head and neck that Daniel had once explained had something to do with triggering his migraines.

After a long while, Daniel finally whispered, “Sorry, Jack.”

“It’s okay. If I ask what’s been bothering you am I going to get my head bit off again?” He slipped his arms around Daniel’s shoulders and pulled him back against his chest.

“A... friend died.”

Daniel’s voice was so low, Jack had to run the sounds around in his head several times to figure out what he said. “I’m sorry.”

Daniel pulled away and turned to the side. He wanted to see how Jack took the next news.

“Actually, Jack... um...” his eyes drifted away and couldn’t go back. “Um...”

Jack pulled Daniel into a gentle hug. “If you’re trying to find a subtle way of telling me that he was more than a friend and that you’re gay, it’s too late.” Despite the tease, Jack’s words were gentle and kind.

Daniel smiled slightly, “I just didn’t want to shock you or anything. I mean, I figured that if you hadn’t guessed by now, I was doing a good job of keeping it to myself.”

Jack leaned down to whisper in Daniel’s ear. “You were doing great, up to about eight months ago when we both got completely plastered and declared our undying love for each other and you let me damn near screw you through the mattress. And while you could have written that off on the Scotch, we were both perfectly sober the next...” Jack stopped and counted in his head. “Five times. And *most* of the times after that.”

Daniel’s smile was sad, but genuine. “I told you that first time... that... well, it wasn’t... the first time, right?”

Jack nodded.

“John was... you know...”

Jack nodded again, relieved that Daniel was finally opening up to him. “Where’d you meet him?”

“Chicago. He worked for the Field Museum. I did some volunteer work there when I was at the Oriental Institute... I was doing guided tours - mostly the foreign language tours - of the Egypt exhibit and some of the other stuff downstairs, he did the schedules... I noticed at one point that he kept scheduling our breaks at the same time...”

Jack hugged him tight. “Were you together long?”

“We were friends for a while first. Sarah and I were still together when I started there. But not long after that we broke up - the... well... the sex thing wasn’t happening to her satisfaction. I think maybe she knew me better than I did at that point. John waited until I’d gotten over her. One night we went to catch a movie and all I did was talk about her. So he took me out to get me really, really drunk.”

Jack stiffened. Daniel wasn’t a child, but he was still pretty naive when Jack had met him and that had been at least one university later.

Daniel put a hand on Jack’s chest to calm him. “Relax, Jack. He got me drunk, told me I had my one chance to cry in my beer over her, took me home and tucked me in bed with a peck on the cheek. He didn’t take advantage of me. He did however refuse to let me stew over her and made me get on with my life. It was ... oh, two or three weeks after that before we even went on our first real ‘date’.”

Jack found himself liking this guy. “So what happened?” He felt like kicking himself for asking. Daniel didn’t need to be talking about the bad stuff tonight.

“Nothing worth writing the tabloids about. I finished my degree at U of C, but they didn’t have any teaching fellowships opening up. He asked if I wanted to go on the museum staff, told me he’d get me an interview with the director. But UCLA wrote and offered me teaching job with the possibility of organizing a dig... until they heard what I was actually trying to *find*, but that’s another story. Anyway, we tried the long distance thing for a while, but we just couldn’t seem to find the time after a few months. He came out about six months after I’d moved and asked me if I’d mind if he started dating someone else he’d met in town.” Daniel shrugged.

“Seems like a mean way to break up.”

“No, not really. We knew we wouldn’t be able to continue the long distance thing any more. I always looked at it as he had the decency to let me know we weren’t going to drag this thing out any more. That we’d always care for each other, but that we needed... more than an occasional weekend.” He shrugged again. “We were both pretty intense.”

Jack didn’t know what to say, so he just snuggled Daniel a little closer against him.

“It was only about a month after that that Katherine approached me about the Stargate. I’ve always wondered what I would have done if we’d still been together when she came to me. As it was, I had nothing to lose.” He smiled up at Jack in the dim lantern light. “And apparently everything to gain.”

Despite their self-imposed rule, Jack allowed himself a quick kiss to say ‘thank you.’

Daniel’s face grew stormy again. “The letter is from the guy he was talking about when he came out to see me. They were together for almost six years. John died, of all the damn things, of some parasite he picked up on a work-vacation to Peru. He was meeting with a bunch of experts on the Inca culture to try and get some things loaned to the museum. I guess he and Rich were swimming in the Amazon and he caught something... Must have moved through him pretty fast if they couldn’t even get him back to the States to get to a modern hospital. I mean, lets face it, unless you’re with the Stargate program, you don’t hear about too many people being killed by a parasite these days.”

Jack kissed the top of Daniel’s head. “How come you were so afraid of talking to me about this?”

“I don’t know. It just didn’t seem right to come boo-hooing to you about my ex. I didn't know how you’d react. I didn’t want to fight.”

“That worked well,” Jack snarked mildly. “Ask you something?”

“Sure. I won’t even yell this time.”

“When was the last time us getting a fight gave you a migraine?”

Daniel’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Never, why?”

“How many times has *not* talking to me about something given you a migraine?” Jack asked, ignoring Daniel’s question.

Daniel dropped his head. The migraines had started after the whole Ma’chello’s-bug-in-his-head thing that had landed him in a padded room. Daniel had been adamant about not talking to anyone about that experience once he’d been let out, until Jack had found him almost writhing on his office floor from the headache. It had been a combination of Doc Fraiser’s drugs and talking to Jack that had finally gotten it to abate. Then, after his last trip to Chicago, Daniel had played his headache off on the Goa’uld hand device he’d been subjected to yet again, but it hadn’t been until he’d talked to Jack about what had happened and how pissed he’d been about being hung up on that he was able to rest without fear of his head exploding.

“Sorry.”

“Just making a point. Even when we fight you feel better than you did tonight.”

Daniel nodded. “I know. And I’m sorry I bit your head off before. You _did_ ask if I wanted to talk. I shouldn’t have gone all psycho on you when you took me at face value when I said ‘no.’”

“It happens. Unfortunately, so does sunrise. If you lay down now you might be able to get another hour or two before Carter gets uppity about moving this camp into that valley she wants to explore today.”

“Jack, I know we said... not on duty, but...”

Jack leaned down and kissed him thoroughly. They were big believers in ‘kiss and make up’ after any kind of argument. When they broke free Jack helped Daniel get situated in his sleeping bag again and turned off the light. As he settled himself into his own bed, he leaned across and placed a gentle kiss on Daniel’s shoulder.

And damn near smacked the man when he heard the mumbled, “Not tonight dear, I have a headache.”


End file.
